Does the loadOntologyFromOntologyDocument method use reasoning when loading an ontology?

Question

I'm wondering why it takes so long to load an ontology from an owl file hosted on my localhost. I use the method loadOntologyFromOntologyDocument(IRI iri) from the OWLOntologyManagerImpl class. Does the loading use any reasoning to check consistency? The owl files I'm loading aren't that big though. They contain about 200 classes.

Answer 1

The loadOntologyFromOntologyDocument() method doesn't do any type of reasoning, it just reads the file and loads the corresponding objects into the memory.

As advised before, it's better to read the file directly from the disk and not loading it via a proxy server like localhost if possible, as it adds more complexity into the process and potentially degrades the performances (you could compare and report the loading times).

Answer 2

I have loaded ontologies from a local server and from remote ones - it is slower than loading the files directly but it should still be reasonably fast, especially with small ontologies. The ontologies I have loaded remotely ranged up to a few megabytes and were loaded at the speed allowed by the connection.

Do you have other remote imports in your ontology? It is possible that the server they are hosted on is serving them slowly.

If you cannot find a way to speed up the loading, you can send an email to the OWL API mailing list at owlapi-developer@lists.sourceforge.net with the ontology, or open an issue on github at https://github.com/owlcs/owlapi; if you stumbled upon a bug of some kind, that's the best way to get it resolved.